NEW YORK CITY: Eat, warm up, clean up: more than two weeks after superstorm Sandy, thousands of people in a remote New York City beach community are struggling just for the basics.

From 10:00 am in Far Rockaway, there was already a long line of people waiting patiently outside the library for overcoats promised by a charity at midday. Two other lines had formed in front of a nearby church.

One was for hot food, the other for daily needs like cleaning liquids, batteries, diapers, brooms and water bottles. Volunteers stood by, offering advice on how to apply for all manner of other aid.

The Rockaway neighborhood is in Queens, part of New York City, but since Sandy struck with huge floods and hurricane-strength winds on October 29, it can feel like somewhere in another, poorer country.

Sandy knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of people and damaged or destroyed many homes through flooding. But while most of the New York area has gotten back on its feet, Rockaway is still crawling.

Everywhere in the modest community south of John F. Kennedy International Airport it’s the same story: long lines of people needing help from churches, federal aid offices, and a multitude of charities.

Many people come with shopping carts that they fill up with everything they can collect, then walk slowly away.

“Do you have a heater? I need a heater,” asked Kiomara Espaillat, a retired woman with a missing leg who was waiting in her wheelchair for an overcoat. She said she lives alone in her apartment, still without heat or light, or even a phone.

Some said they’d been helped initially by friends or family, but as time dragged on that became impossible.

The 16 days that have passed since Sandy seemed like an eternity for many.

On Beach Channel Drive, Linda Di Cenio was distraught over her small home, bought just last June. There was still water oozing from the floor.

Like her neighbors, she’d emptied her belongings out onto the sidewalk in an attempt to dry them in the increasingly cold air. She said she had no insurance. “I don’t know where to go, I cannot sleep,” she said.

Nearby, volunteers had set up distribution of clean socks and towels in the garden of another house.

At another corner, there were abandoned apartments with doors off their hinges and waterlines showing the flooding had reached more than three feet (one meter) high. Inside, there was a children’s shoe, a pile of clothing, toys, and sand. The renters apparently never returned.

On the west side of the peninsula, on Rockaway Beach boulevard, the noise of generators used to supply electricity was deafening. There was an impromptu clinic in a house still smelling of damp.

In front, the scorched ruins of houses destroyed in a blaze at the height of the hurricane were being razed. Passersby wore hospital masks to avoid breathing the dust.

The skyscrapers of Manhattan were barely visible off in the distance.